Hacker News Digest
· 21 Hacker News
Signal's Android app is gaining the scaffolding for numberless accounts: new login screens, username setup during registration, and a fresh zkgroup credential. Community members note that zero-knowle…
I'm building a website for discovering first names that's enjoyable to explore: https://abracadanames.com. I started it after a family member told me they were frustrated with existing websites, whic…
FBI Director Kash Patel directed his public affairs chief to respond to a mocking X post from the account @IfindRetards, according to texts released under the Freedom of Information Act. When aide Be…
Automattic has confirmed that Matt Mullenweg is back as CEO after the board voted to put him on paid leave earlier this week. Mullenweg refused to step down, removed other admins from Slack, and told…
In a 2011 speech, Cory Doctorow argues that the fight over copyright is just the opening battle in a larger war over general-purpose computers. He traces how DRM failed technically and commercially,…
A browser game that inverts the classic arcade formula: instead of piloting a ship and dodging asteroids, you control the asteroid and smash the spaceships. The Hacker News thread praises the twist,…
Apple's developer site now hosts downloadable dimensional drawings and technical specs for its full hardware lineup, from the original iPhone 12 through unreleased models like the iPhone 17 Pro Max,…
A compression engineer explains why JPEG XL, despite its technical strengths, is the wrong choice for the Web. He argues that libjxl's lossy compression lags behind AVIF in both perceptual quality an…
OpenAI trained GPT-2, a 1.5-billion-parameter language model, on 40GB of internet text. It achieves state-of-the-art results on many benchmarks and can perform reading comprehension, translation, and…
Nathan Lambert's reading list tracks the open-model debate: why Meta and others release weights, how Chinese labs like DeepSeek, Qwen, and GLM now lead, and why distillation—training on another model…
Is It Greg? is a tiny Chrome extension that badges Hacker News submissions linking to greg.technology or any subdomain, plus stories and comments posted by Greg himself (gregsadetsky). Matches get a…
Carnegie Mellon's Jason Hong outlines eleven reasons privacy is so hard: it's a fuzzy concept, risks vary by relationship, technology advances rapidly, and companies profit from data. Developers lack…
I design mechanical watch faces for Garmin, and people often ask if the wheels are just a picture. They are a picture, but behind them sits a calibre I had to solve like a real one: tooth counts, pos…
Sci-fi often defaults to dystopia, yet optimistic visions like Star Trek and WALL-E show futures worth living in. The author argues that optimism isn't utopian—it's about problem-solving and progress…
A landmark report from Miles Brundage, Shahar Avin, Jack Clark, Helen Toner, and 22 other researchers surveys how AI could amplify security threats across the digital, physical, and political domains…
Nike will drop out of the S&P 100 on September 21, ending nearly 18 years in the benchmark. The sportswear giant has shed over $200 billion in market value since its November 2021 peak, a roughly 78%…
In 1832, L. A. Necker published observations on optical phenomena seen in Switzerland and on a phenomenon occurring when viewing a crystal or geometrical solid. This paper introduced the Necker cube,…
The VidMarket turns YouTube into a daily prediction game. Every day, the newest videos from 400+ channels open for 48-hour predictions. Vote Must-See or Skip to move live rankings, and use Call Top 3…
Robots are advancing rapidly, with humanoids like Atlas and Optimus learning new skills, but they are not ready for homes. They are too complex, costly, and unsafe, and will first appear in factories…
Archaeologists long overlooked rope, string, and twine because they decay, yet these soft technologies were essential. A 35,000-year-old perforated ivory baton from Hohle Fels, with spiral grooves ar…
The debate over AI's impact boils down to whether it can acquire every human capability. If it can, then any new jobs it creates are also jobs it can do, leading to a world where AI does all the work…